Codepope's Development Hell

Facebook, in their now traditional goal of taking on big data problems, solving them and then open sourcing the result, have open-sourced Presto, a distributed SQL query engine “optimized for ad-hoc analysis at interactive speed”. This type of app is designed for the folks who need to work out what people who like chips and cheese and rock but dont like bagels or opera also have, statistically, in common. Its a simple enough question, but when you get up to Facebook scale, its a hard question to answer.

Fedora 20 enters Beta: Fedora 20 has entered beta so its time to step up that testing as there’s lots of goodies in “Heisenbug”. Top items include ARM as a primary architecture, the end of sendmail and syslog as defaults, fresh tools and more. Thats all in the announcement along with pointers on where to go for your downloads and further information on the GNOME 3.10 powered Fedora 20 beta.

4 Years of Go: Time flies when a language develops and Go is no exception as it celebrated its fourth year noting some of the projects built in Go (Docker, Packer, NSQ, JuJu and more) and Go users (CloudFlare, SoundCloud, ngrok, Poptip, Splice and obviously Google). The Docker folk have presented why they use Go, both the good and the bad, covering what doesn’t work well for them too.

Slackware updated: The venerable Slackware Linux has had its annual update for 2013 announced by Patrick Volkerding and a fine update it appears to be. A 3.10.17 Linux kernel, X11R7.7 X Windows, 64-bit UEFI installation support and updates across the board for dev tools, applications, desktops (Xfce 4.10.1 and KDE 4.10.5) and more. And Slackware ARM 14.1 is also available. MariaDB 10.0 goes Beta: As MariaDB, the community-supported and developed MySQL fork, branches away from MySQL with version 10.

Catching up on Codescaling with some of the less mentioned things worth noting… FreeBSD 10.0’s latest beta: It’s into the home/RC straight for FreeBSD 10 with the release of the third and hopefully last beta of the development cycle. The original schedule would have seen RC2 available around now, but with a focus on a quality release, there’s been a bit of slippage. Check out this FreeBSD News item from September for a feel of what’s going in.

Cisco and Mozilla have made an announcement - Cisco will open source an H.264 implementation and Mozilla will incorporate support for a binary version of that open source code in Firefox in 2014. But what’s behind this move… Firefox has wrestled with the H.264 video bear for some time now. Initially Mozilla took the position that there’d be no patented royalty-bearing standards implemented in Firefox and eschewed H.264 support in HTML5’s tag for Google’s VP8-based WebM.

Python 2.6 signs out: Python 2.6.9 is the last source-only security fix release for the Python 2.6 family. The 2.6.9 release sees 2.6 officially retired after five years in the field. If you are still running 2.6, UPDATE! At the other end of the scale, Python 3.3.3 got its first release candidate with full support for Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks. dotCloud becomes Docker Inc: Acknowledging how important its Docker container software has become, dotCloud has announced it is becoming Docker Inc.

If you were using MongoHQ’s SSD backed MongoDB hosting, be prepared for them to be in touch as they’ve been at the sharp end of a security breach. But it’s not just direct users of MongoHQ’s services that should be concerned - users of services which make use of MongoHQ need to put on their worrying hat too. For example, MongoHQ hosted Buffer’s databases and that has been cited as the cause of the social media connector’s security breach.

Lime text editor: People love the Sublime Text editor. But being closed source does set some folks worrying. Some of them do something about it though, such as “quarnster” who has been creating Lime as an open source version of Sublime Text. Built with a combination of Go 1.1, Python3, Oniguruma and optional Qt5, Lime still has plenty to implement, including compatibility with Sublime’s Python API, keybindings and snippets, TextMate Snippits and getting solid cross platform support.

News arrives here that PEP (Python Enhancement Proposal) 453 has been accepted. PEP 453, titled “Explicit bootstrapping of pip in Python installations”, sets out to sort out one of the long standing problems in the Python ecosystem - not having a common modern packaging system for Python packages. Pip has become popular with Python users but for new users things have been somewhat odd. You need to use the old default installer application easy_install to install pip and then we’re ready to install packages.